Château de Lacoste

The castle above Lacoste dates from the 11th century, though it was heavily altered in the centuries that followed. It sits on a spur of the northern flank of the Petit Luberon, looking across the Calavon valley to the Monts de Vaucluse, Mont Ventoux and the neighbouring hill village of Bonnieux. For generations it belonged to the Simiane family, a line sprung from the house of Agoult.

How it passed from the Simianes to the Sades is told two ways: by the marriage of Diane Simiane to Jean-Baptiste de Sade, an ancestor of the marquis, in 1627, or by the bequest of 1716, in which Isabelle Simiane left the castle to her cousin Gaspard François de Sade, lord of Saumane and Mazan. The bequest is thought the more probable route.

The Marquis de Sade lived at La Coste from 1769 to 1772, between the scandals of Arcueil and Marseille, and it was in 1772, his longest stay, that he built a theatre inside the castle seating 120 spectators. After the Marseille affair and his flight to Italy he took refuge here again until his imprisonment in the keep of Vincennes in 1777; escaping while being transferred to Aix, he hid at La Coste one last time in the summer of 1778 before being returned to Vincennes.

Through all his years of internment he kept an extraordinary attachment to the place, attested in his letters to Gaufridy, the notary of Apt who managed his Provençal affairs. He wrote the castle into his fiction too, in La Marquise de Gange and — under the name of the château de Silling — in The 120 Days of Sodom.

In September 1792 the castle was vandalised and largely destroyed, its building materials sold off for other constructions. Sade, then in Paris as a member of the Piques section, wrote in anguish: "What a loss! It is beyond expression... I am in despair!" Crippled by debts, he was forced in 1796 to sell the castle and its lands to Rovère, deputy of Vaucluse and a native of Bonnieux, who meant to found a sort of dynasty in the region. The plan died with the Coup of 18 Fructidor: Rovère was deported to French Guiana, where he died at Sinnamary in 1798.

On 29 June 1816 Rovère's widow sold the estate for twelve hundred francs to Pierre Grégoire, a joiner and farmer. The deed described a castle "in ruin... without doors, windows or ironwork", its grounds reduced to ploughland, wasteland and rock.

In 1952 André Bouer, a schoolteacher, became the owner and devoted himself to the castle's restoration, and on 21 August 1992 the ruin — with its courtyards and dry moats — was inscribed as a monument historique.

The couturier Pierre Cardin bought the castle in 2001, pledging to the former owner that it would pass to the Institut de France on his death. He took the restoration in hand and founded the Festival de Lacoste, an annual summer festival of opera and theatre held in the quarries west of the ruin, adding a first film festival in 2020 before his death that 29 December. His heir, his nephew Rodrigo Basilicati Cardin, was drawn in 2023 into a legal battle over the estate.